1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for rate control within a digital communications network. In particular, this invention is related to systems and methods of adjusting the rate control of a digital data within a digital communications network based upon content or type.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data networks are well known. Over the last several years, the proliferation of the Internet has had a significant impact on many industries, especially the computer industry. The Internet has grown into such an enormous structure to which virtually any large or small computer network may be connected. In fact, it is now common place for the vast majority of people to have access to the Internet, either through their business or work and/or through personal accounts. This connectivity has allowed many businesses, universities, governments, etc. to expand to provide their services via the Internet.
Most people or businesses obtain Internet access via an Internet Service Providers (ISP). ISPs provide access to the Internet for their customers usually through membership subscriptions in conjunction with service level agreements (SLAs). ISPs make at least a portion of their income on service fees such as subscription fees, on-demand provisioning of services, etc. One technique employed by ISPs is to regulate the amount of Internet bandwidth (i.e., data speed) that a customer is entitled based upon how much they pay. By regulating the amount of bandwidth available to each customer, ISPs may provide different levels or qualities of service at different rates. At the network level, this type of rate control usually is enforced via some sort of device configuration.
For example, one standard device configuration for controlling the data rate of network access (bandwidth) involves controlling the data flow at a network device, such as a switch, between the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) and a customer. A network device may be configured to use a rate control method often referred to as the “leaky bucket.” The leaky bucket method involves configuring a network device to restrict the amount of data (i.e., data packets) that a customer may receive (e.g., via a port of the network device), by tokenizing the data and setting a threshold. Data packets are assigned a number of tokens by the device based on their size, and once a customer meets the threshold assigned for a period of time, all further packets are dropped during that same period. The amount of data equal to a token, and the amount of tokens a customer is afforded maybe set by the ISP. For example, a token may be considered to be 10 Kbits. A customer may be set to 200 tokens/second, or 2 Mbits/second (Mbps). The device drops any data packets, which are received into the network to be routed to the customer and exceed this limitation.
The leaky bucket method is one well known way for an ISP to control the data rate (bandwidth) that a customer receives. However, there are several drawbacks to the leaky bucket method. Today, Internet users may order and purchase a variety of different services, such as HDTV, video on demand, music, applications, etc. Some of these services often require a large amount of bandwidth. For example, HDTV may require 12–20 Mbps of data. Dropped packets can significantly reduce the quality of such services as video. As a result, there are problems associated with implementing rate control for Internet subscribers.
For example, an ISP may limit a group of its lower paying customers to 1 Mbps bandwidth. The bandwidth may be regulated by a network device, such as a switch in the ISP's network, physically close to and/or connected to the customer's PC. Take the case where one such customer may order HDTV. In order to provide HDTV to the customer, the ISP must provision the network to provide the necessary bandwidth to deliver the HDTV. That is, if the customer is currently limited to data at a rate of 1 Mbps, then certain devices must be reconfigured to provide an increased bandwidth sufficient to provide HDTV without dropped packets. This usually entails physically configuring the network device already regulating the customer's bandwidth, such as a switch, to provide the necessary bandwidth to the customer. However, to configure a switch might include physically interfacing with the switch and programming the switch to provide the necessary bandwidth. Then, after the HDTV has been provided, interfacing with the switch again in order to reset the bandwidth to 1 Mbps for that customer.
Manually configuring a network device to change the bandwidth provided is a time consuming task, which reduces performance (i.e., delays in delivering the network service) and costs more (i.e., time=money). Accordingly, there is a need for new and improved systems and methods for controlling the data access rate of Internet customers that are more flexible in providing higher bandwidth on-demand, inexpensively.